Insights: Luna Maurer, Moniker, Amsterdam

According to the “Conditional Design” manifesto, Luna Maurer is interested in logic-based design as a tool to understand the ungraspable. Her work with interactive media bridges the divide between digital and analogue systems, often relying on deceptively simple rules to create complex organic artworks. Maurer is especially known for her participatory experiments in which she designs a process that requires the participants to implement—often in humble materials such as tape, markers, and sticky notes—algorithmic explorations of group thought that expose the process of making. Her work explores the relationship between people and technology, and she has created a breadth of projects—from an exhibition of 400,000 photos of the Amsterdam sky to a website designed in Microsoft Excel. Based in Amsterdam, her three-person studio Moniker balances applied commercial projects with self-initiated experiments. She is a visiting critic at Yale University School of Art and teaches interaction design at the Gerrit Reitveld Academy in Amsterdam. Maurer will present
a “social experiment” with the lecture audience, unique to Insights 2013.